A king cannot stay with a woman who is less than a queen, because she won't be able to hold his paradox. By her limitation she will compress contradiction into whatever most excites or terrifies her and become blind to everything else
Her impulse is to shrink him into something more comprehensible and digestible, since his full self is too much for her to grasp
So she will fail to unravel his riddle and admire his complexity and sharp contrasts, and he will find it hard to take her seriously because whole parts of him go unseen
How can a man truly love a woman who does not fully see him?
Many women enjoy a man who offers both steadiness and danger, ruthlessness and tenderness—they like being the beneficiary of opposing poles and how that shapes their experience of him—but enjoying that feeling doesn't equal connecting with the man who produces it; what about his experience of her?
A partner must appreciate him not only for how he makes her feel, but because she understands him—willing to give what she expects to receive, to see him completely and love him for all that he is